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I've been doing a lot of interviews lately, and a common question is: Where do you get your ideas? Usually, I fall back on my old standby (Walmart, aisle 13), but the fact is that it's a legitimate question. It's also one that's hard to answer, not only because the question is usually asked of in the sense of the "royal you," as in "where do all authors in general get their ideas?" Like maybe there's an Idea Mart over behind the Dairy Queen. But all authors are different, so I can't speak for the entire species.

Worse, I can't even really speak for myself, because each book is completely different. Some I remember in detail, and some I remember a kernel, and some I don't have the foggiest idea.

Right now, my book Tainted is on shelves (yay! hooray! release the balloons!). It's the first book of three, which are being released back-to-back, and this is one of the amorphous ones, because the story stems so much from the character, who I really got to know while writing and revising. Alas, I can't go into too much detail without revealing spoilers, but basically: I had the germ of a character (an assassin who hunts demons) and the germ of a plot (there are bad guys doing bad things and she needs to stop them). But when you get right down to it, that's pretty generic. And the story itself isn't really generic at all. Why? Well, for one, the story twists and turns all over the place. For another, the heroine really is the story, and Lily is pretty unique (and, thankfully, the reviews so far are backing me up on this, which is always a nice feeling for an author!). All of which is my rambling way of saying that the "story idea" of Tainted wasn't a Slam Bam moment, but a slow build of working out character and story in tandem.